AI PHOTO SHOOT SERVICE · 2026
Shotra
You send in your own photos and get back a finished shoot in the style you chose.
As published on www.shotra.ru
- 10 000+
- images generated
- 500+
- users
- 236+
- styles in the catalogue
Why
At fifteen I was bleaching my hair blonde in a pirated Photoshop and pasting my face into magazine spreads. When I was made redundant at Sber, what I felt was not fear but release — I had finally been pushed into doing the thing I had wanted for years. And good photographs are needed all the time: a profile, a CV, a job application. A shoot, meanwhile, costs a few thousand roubles and a whole day, and you cannot know the result in advance. Shotra grew out of a single question: what is left of a photo shoot once you take away the studio, the photographer and the shooting day.
How I did it
Alone, from hypothesis to production: web app, generation pipeline, payments, client side. I ran the advertising myself too, and that is where the product decisions came from: a funnel shows you which step people leave on, and what that step costs.
Timeline
-
6 FEBRUARY 2026
First commit. The project was called AI Photoshoot back then.
-
+ 6 DAYS
Payments working inside the bot.
-
+ 17 DAYS
Release with a promo code for 23 February. Three weeks from idea to a working service.
-
+ 4 MONTHS
First real payment — 51 roubles. The payment button had been ready four months before the demand showed up, and that is the main lesson of the project.
-
NOW
10,000+ images, 500+ users, 236 styles. Pricing rewritten six times.
Catalogue — 236 styles
What I decided
-
Everything on the web, the bot comes after payment
Ads used to lead straight into a Telegram bot, and part of the audience fell out at that hop. I moved the landing page, the generation and the payment onto the web — the bot now belongs to people who have already paid.
-
The campaign goal is a payment, not a click
An ad algorithm will happily optimise for button clicks and bring you people who click. There may be no paying customers among them at all. I moved the goal onto the payment event.
-
Don't change the structure mid-flight
Reworking the landing page and the prices resets the campaign's learning. I fix bugs immediately, but hold prices and catalogue structure unchanged for at least two weeks.
What's next
-
A cascade instead of a shop window of tariffs
When six packages are shown at once, the visitor has to work out the grid for themselves. I am breaking the paywall into a sequence: one clear tariff first, and whoever turns it down then sees a cheaper offer with less in it.
-
A result page
Someone who has seen their own photos once wants more. A dedicated result page is a must-have.
-
Bringing the audience back
A channel and a mailing list, so that traffic does not leak away after one visit. Results here show up on a quarterly horizon.